BERKELEY, Calif.

Police shoot gunman inside university business school

A man with a gun was shot by police Tuesday inside the business school at the University of California, Berkeley, after hundreds of students and anti-Wall Street activists descended on the campus for a day of protests.

Ute Frey, a spokeswoman for the university, said officials did not yet know whether the suspect was part of the Occupy Cal movement.

University officials said a staff member saw a man carrying what appeared to be a gun in an elevator at the business school.

Police arrived and found the suspect in a computer room where there were at least four students, university officials said. The suspect raised the gun and was shot by an officer at about 2:22 p.m, roughly five minutes after the initial call, according to the school.

None of the students was hurt. The condition of the suspect was not immediately known.

ROME

Prime minister-designate set to present government

Prime Minister-designate Mario Monti of Italy said Tuesday he is ready to present his new government to the president after winning wide backing – and important pledges of sacrifices – from political, business and union leaders during two days of intense consultations.

Monti said he still has to put the final touches on his Cabinet and economic program, which he will outline to President Giorgio Napolitano today. His government must receive votes of confidence in both houses of Parliament, expected this week, to take office and begin the task of steering the eurozone’s third-largest economy through its debt crisis.

Monti, a respected economist and former European commissioner, is under pressure to quickly reassure financial markets that Italy will avoid a default.

RAMALLAH, West Bank

Rival Palestinian factions agree to conduct elections

The rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas have agreed to hold elections next May, a senior official said Tuesday, in what would be a major step toward ending a four-year rift.

Azzam al-Ahmad, a senior Fatah negotiator, said the sides agreed on the election plan in secret talks and are expected to formally approve it later this month.

The plan calls for the establishment of a caretaker government to prepare for the vote – most likely without current Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Dismissing Fayyad would be a huge gamble. The U.S.-educated economist is widely respected in the West and is key to ensuring the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars of international aid

WASHINGTON

Woman admits conspiring to ship reactor material

A San Francisco-area suburbanite pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to ship material for a Pakistani nuclear reactor after initially denying she was behind any scheme contributing to the proliferation threat.

Xun Wang, a former managing director of PPG Paints Trading Co. of Shanghai, admitted her guilt Tuesday before a federal judge in Washington. She also reached a $200,000 settlement with the Commerce Department and agreed to cooperate with investigators.

PPG Paints Trading also pleaded guilty in December. The company and its parent, Pittsburgh-based PPG Industries Inc., paid nearly $4 million in fines and restitution.

Wang, a Chinese citizen and lawful U.S. permanent resident, was accused of conspiring to send high-performance epoxy coatings to the Chashma II nuclear reactor run by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.

She admitted helping send three shipments of the coatings from the United States to Pakistan through a third-party distributor in China without the required license from the Commerce Department.